Tag Archive for Difficulty

Whilst work on X-Orbtek II is going at a pretty solid rate, the remake of Invertical has slowed down a little bit… after all there’s only so many hours in the day (curse you day job and sleep!). However there has been progress and I’m hoping on looking at a June re-release of Invertical with the Linux version out just after (or at the same time!).

With the new levels all built, just needing plenty playtesting & bug fixing, my coding focus now switches to the user interface. One of the key things that I’ll be introducing is a pause menu. This will include a few options that you can toggle and the option to skip the level.

The original intention here was to be for players who have already completely the chapter and are replaying for collectibles, or just the fun of it. However I’m rather tempted to just have it as an option all the time. On many games I have came across that one level, jump, puzzle or bad guy that I can’t beat. As a result I may have stopped playing and that isn’t a particularly great situation. The game developer has all this great content in the game yet I’m blocked from accessing it over one bit of gameplay. I’d hate for that to occur in Invertical.

On the other side of things, if I’m allowing players to just skip through the game then surely that devalues that whole achievement of playing through a game? The skill requirement and challenge is what makes players better at the game as well as providing satisfaction when they win.

Could this be a bad move or will it allow players to experience more of the unique and interesting levels in Invertical that they otherwise might not get to play?